[E-rundbrief] Info 785 - Uri Avnery: How Many Divisions?

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 785 - Uri Avnery: How Many Divisions?

Bad Ischl, 10.1.2009

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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Uri Avnery
10.1.09

				How Many Divisions?

NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime 
was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a 
gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's 
inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht 
from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but 
to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which 
caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The 
Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions 
of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their 
Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the 
Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books -- if 
the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are 
being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of 
Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human 
shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive 
bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children 
and unarmed men are killed and injured.


IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The 
disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its 
airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few 
thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one 
to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. 
But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli 
propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of 
the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace 
camp. The rationale of the Israeli government ("The state must defend 
its citizens against the Qassam rockets") has been accepted as the whole 
truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation 
for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the 
Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV 
screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the 
dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera's Arabic 
channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified 
father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences 
from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.

War -- every war -- is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or 
psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for 
one's country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being 
branded a traitor.

The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist 
himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and 
falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.

An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this 
war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee 
camp.

Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the 
army "revealed" that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near 
the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed 
showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official 
army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In 
brief: a falsification.

Later the official liar claimed that "our  soldiers were shot at from 
inside the school". Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to 
UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the 
school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of 
terrified refugees.

But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the 
Israeli public was completely convinced that "they shot from inside the 
school", and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.

So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the 
act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly 
became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every 
school a terror command post, every civilian government building a 
"symbol of Hamas rule". Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the 
"most moral army in the world".


THE TRUTH is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. 
This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak -- a man whose way of 
thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called "moral 
insanity", a sociopathic disorder.

The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to 
terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination of the 
planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign 
country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.

The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently 
democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem 
and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had come to the 
conclusion that Fatah's peaceful approach had gained precisely nothing 
from Israel - neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the 
prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and 
creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted in the population 
-- not only as a resistance movement fighting the foreign occupier, like 
the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past -- but also as a political and 
religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.

 From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a 
foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other 
Palestinian regions. They do not "hide behind the population", the 
population views them as their only defenders.

Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions. 
Turning life into living hell does not cause the population to rise up 
against Hamas, but on the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and 
reinforces its determination not to surrender. The population of 
Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than the Londoners 
rose up against Churchill.

He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely 
populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of civilians. 
Apparently that did not touch him. Or he believed that "they will change 
their ways" and "it will sear their consciousness", so that in future 
they will not dare to resist Israel.

A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties 
among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro-war 
public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That is what 
happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.

This consideration played an especially important role because the 
entire war is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in 
the polls in the first days of the war, knew that his ratings would 
collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.

Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our 
soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The 
planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli 
soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance of casualties on 
our side is the overriding commandment, which is causing record numbers 
of civilian casualties on the other side.

That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of warfare -- 
and that has been its Achilles heel.

A person without imagination, like Barak (his election slogan: "Not a 
Nice Guy, but a Leader") cannot imagine how decent people around the 
world react to actions like the killing of whole extended families, the 
destruction of houses over the heads of their inhabitants, the rows of 
boys and girls in white shrouds ready for burial, the reports about 
people bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not allowed to 
reach them, the killing of doctors and medics on their way to save 
lives, the killing of UN drivers bringing in food. The pictures of the 
hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured lying together on 
the floor for lack of space, have shocked the world. No argument has any 
force next to an image of a wounded little girl lying on the floor, 
twisting with pain and crying out: "Mama! Mama!"

The planners thought that they could stop the world from seeing these 
images by forcibly preventing press coverage. The Israeli journalists, 
to their shame, agreed to be satisfied with the reports and photos 
provided by the Army Spokesman, as if they were authentic news, while 
they themselves remained miles away from the events. Foreign journalists 
were not allowed in either, until they protested and were taken for 
quick tours in selected and supervised groups. But in a modern war, such 
a sterile manufactured view cannot completely exclude all others -- the 
cameras are inside the strip, in the middle of the hell, and cannot be 
controlled. Aljazeera broadcasts the pictures around the clock and 
reaches every home.


THE BATTLE for the TV screen is one of the decisive battles of the war.

Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a 
billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are 
horrified. This has a strong impact on the war. Many of the viewers see 
the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority as 
collaborators with Israel in carrying out these atrocities against their 
Palestinian brothers.

The security services of the Arab regimes are registering a dangerous 
ferment among the peoples. Hosny Mubarak, the most exposed Arab leader 
because of his closing of the Rafah crossing in the face of terrified 
refugees, started to pressure the decision-makers in Washington, who 
until that time had blocked all calls for a cease-fire. These began to 
understand the menace to vital American interests in the Arab world and 
suddenly changed their attitude -- causing consternation among the 
complacent Israeli diplomats.

People with moral insanity cannot really understand the motives of 
normal people and must guess their reactions. "How many divisions has 
the Pope?" Stalin sneered. "How many divisions have people of 
conscience?" Ehud Barak may well be asking.

As it turns out, they do have some. Not numerous. Not very quick to 
react. Not very strong and organized. But at a certain moment, when the 
atrocities overflow and masses of protesters come together, that can 
decide a war.


THE FAILURE to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a failure to grasp 
the predictable results. Not only is Israel unable to win the war, Hamas 
cannot lose it.

Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter 
to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas fighters would be 
seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the Palestinian 
people, models for emulation by every youngster in the Arab world. The 
West Bank would fall into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah 
would drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be threatened 
with collapse.

If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in 
face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a 
fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.

What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the 
image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to 
commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. 
This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our 
standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.

In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against 
the State of Israel.

-- 

Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
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